Ann Mandelbaum: Thin Skin

One mouth, one elbow, one row of eyelashes— Ann Mandelbaum’s intense examinations of a single human feature at a time are best known in photographic form, but here readers see her sculpture and video, too. The prints, casts and stills show one of the most convincing, authentic positions in contemporary surrealism, an artist exploring the experiences of her own body, its fantastic reality and her psychophysical fate. Thin Skin is Mandelbaum’s third book, and it relates and compares casts of body parts made in recent years, fragments of reality reinterpreted in her photographs and the microorganisms she has invented and collected in display cases. “Lips stick, then part/Spit glows, then pops/Motion tells, dispels. Resells/What and where appear and smear . . . .”—Ann